Due to the increasing small size and higher performance of information equipment and advances in electronic information technology such as digitization of information, a variety of signal processing apparatuses, data recording/reproducing apparatuses, communication apparatuses, information processing apparatuses, etc. have spread in use. These apparatuses have come to make frequent use of positional information in recent years.
For example, by storing positional information of facilities and locations originating certain data, positional information of locations acquiring certain data, etc. linked with the data, there are the effects that when later using the data, it becomes easier to use the data, it becomes possible to use the data in a new form, etc. Thus, data has come to be used in a variety of venues.
More specifically, it is being used for clearly indicating locations of post offices or restaurants along with information thereof, for indicating shooting locations for photos and other image data, etc.
This positional information is numerical data such as latitude and longitude and in itself is hard for people to directly understand, grasp, and use.
Therefore, in many cases the data is used by the method of using some sort of pointer or mark on map information to indicate the position.
For this, each apparatus has to hold the map information in advance.
However, there was the problem that this map information was generally a large amount of data and it was difficult for all apparatuses to hold the information. Particularly, it has been substantially difficult to store and hold such a large amount of map information in mobile terminals, camcorders, and other small sized equipment. As a result, there is the problem that positional information cannot be used in the most suitable form in apparatuses not holding map information.